Material

Very few props and costumes which were used in early modern performance still exist today. Yorick’s skull, Tamburlaine’s crown(s), Campaspe’s portrait: we only know about them because they are written about in dramatic texts. The few surviving examples, such as this prop letter, this bird whistle, and this spangled (sequinned) jacket, are noteworthy because their survival is so unusual. How do we recover material knowledge of early modern props and costumes when the objects themselves no longer exist?

Waistcoat. 1610-20. V&A Museum MA/1/G/190. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Aspects of this waistcoat which suggest it may have been used as a masque costume include the low neckline, and metal spangles and silver thread which would have caught the light.

This question is wrapped up within the term material itself, whose overlapping meanings of substance, subject, and importance would all have been heard by an early modern ear as much as our own. Material originates from the Latin materia meaning ‘wood, timber’, and, as such, encompasses the timber-frame playhouses as well as the ideas embodied on their stages. The term encapsulates the dual nature of performance as something based in both imagination and physical substance. This post considers how we can recover the material aspects of two early modern props: sugared sweets and magic mirrors. These props help us to think about what we mean when we talk about the ‘material’ in relation to early modern performance, and particularly the audience experience of the material.

The account book of the Office of the Revels documents the expenses for court entertainments, including the purchase of props and wages of labourers. One of the expenses listed for the anonymously-authored Masque of Janus in 1573 is a payment to apothecary Roger Moorer for four pounds of ‘Cu[m]fett[es]’, including ones of ‘Musk’, ‘Clove’, ‘Synamon’, and ‘Gynger’. Comfits are small, hard sweets comprising a seed or spice surrounded by layers of sugar. These cumfettes, or comfits, ‘served for fflakes of yse [ice] & hayle stones in the maske of Ianvs’ (Feuillerat, 175). They may have been dropped or thrown to represent hailstones, before being eaten by spectators and performers (and I have written more about their use for Before Shakespeare). The ingredients listed give us some insight into what the comfits may have smelled and tasted like. But beyond that, the details are sparse.

In his Delightes for Ladies (1600), Hugh Plat describes how to make comfits. Various cooking techniques will result in ‘fine small comfits’ (D1v) or ‘crispe and ragged comfits’ (D2v) and the results are ‘very white’ (D3v). This description is confirmed by 17th-century still life paintings which include dishes of comfits, such as this one by Jeremias van Winghe from 1607.

Jeremias van Winghe. A Roemer on a Silver-Gilt Bekerschroef, Sweetmeats in a Silver Tazza, Langoustines on a Plate, Walnuts and an Apple on a Table Top. 1607. Accession Number: NK1493 (Stichting Nederlands Kunstbezit) / 1044 (Jacques Goudstikker Collection).

The comfits on their silver stand appear slightly off-white with a glossy surface. Their uneven texture suggests they may be akin to Plat’s ‘ragged’ comfits, but the Janus comfits may have had a smoother finish, so that they more clearly resembled hailstones. Their sizes and shapes vary according to the central spice or seed. The comfits in Janus were made of cinnamon, cloves, ginger, and musk, so would likely have been of varying shapes and sizes too.

While comfits are no longer regularly made and eaten, they are the ancestor of sweets like sugared almonds and aniseed balls. Accordingly, I purchased a large bag of sugared almonds for a little practice-as-research. They have a smooth surface, but lack the gloss of van Winghe’s painting. The sugar slowly dissolves on the tongue, gradually revealing the almond hidden inside. If you’re impatient, you can immediately bite through the sugar, although it’s hard on the teeth and as ‘crisp’ as Plat describes. It’s easy to imagine how these sweets added a tasty, tactile element to the performance of Janus through the direct interactions of the audience and players with these sugared materials.

Sugared almonds: today’s delicious and crunchy cousin of comfits. Author’s Image.

Another prop which is revealed by the documentary record is a ‘glasse’ (mirror) in Anthony Munday’s play John a Kent and John a Cumber (c. 1590). The play may have been performed at the Rose playhouse, south of the Thames in Bankside, where fragments of mirror have been found. These two artefacts are a 37cm-long piece of oval hardwood frame with fragments of the reflective mineral mica along one edge, and a very clear fragment of glass with white-metal foil on one face, 6mm thick. Both mirrors would likely have been large and expensive (Bowsher and Miller, 210-11). The size and expense of the mirrors make it unlikely that they could be carried on stage by an actor.

The stage direction in Munday’s play directs the character John a Cumber to ‘look in his glasse’ while he says, ‘Now Iohn a Kent...what [a]rt thou dooing?’ (f6r, 735 to f6v, 736). Both characters are magicians, and Cumber appears to be able to use the mirror to magically spy on his rival, John a Kent. The mirror may therefore be imitating the most popular form of Elizabethan mirror: the scrying mirror. Scrying was a centuries-old practice whereby a reflective surface was used to divine images. It was the pursuit of both scholarly magicians and so-called cunning-folk (local practitioners of folk magic). The scrying mirror and its imagined reflections, which may themselves be a form of performance, feel particularly appropriate for a play which is pre-occupied with magic, disguises, and shadows.

Alan Macfarlane’s examination of records of witchcraft prosecutions finds a description from 1578 of a scrying mirror being used by a cunningman, who ‘browghte with him a looking glasse, (about vii or viii inches square), and did hange the said glasse up over the benche in his said hawle, upon a nayle’ (quoted in Macfarlane, 124-5). The size of this mirror would be large enough to be visible to a Rose playhouse audience, and small enough to be portable.

Early modern glass is so fragile that it rarely survives to the present day. One mirror which does survive may have been used by sixteenth-century scholar, mathematician, and astrologer, John Dee. Scrying reached peak popularity in the sixteenth century thanks in part to the activities of Dee and his medium Edward Kelley, who claimed to use crystal balls and an obsidian ‘shew-stone’ to talk to angelic spirits (French, 110-15). The obsidian mirror can be found today in the British Museum.

Dr Dee’s Magical Mirror. British Museum 1966,1001.1. 14th Century - 16th Century (?). © The Trustees of the British Museum.

The obsidian mirror is similar in dimensions to the cunningman’s mirror, about 7 inches (18.4cm) in diameter and 0.5 inches (1.3cm) thick. Back when such things were possible, I visited the mirror in the British Museum. I was struck by how images online do not do justice to the black, smooth surface. The reflection it offers is dark but sharp and it is not unlike looking into the darkened screen of a mobile phone (can we get Charlie Brooker to do a Dee-inspired Black Mirror episode?). The object and its reflections are so mysterious that it is easy to imagine it being used to conjure spirits. Perhaps something resembling it was used as a prop in Munday’s magician play. Although an obsidian mirror would be far more expensive than a glass one, audience members may have thought of Dee’s mirror, or that of their local cunningman, when they saw Cumber’s ‘glasse’.

It is possible to recover various material aspects of early modern props, but to varying degrees. I can eat sugared almonds to my heart’s content, but when I visit Dee’s obsidian mirror, it’s shut off behind glass. Present but intangible. My experience with these objects may actually resemble the experience of early modern spectators. Different kinds of performance prompt different interactions with spectators, and while audience members were likely encouraged to eat the comfits as part of the masque, on the stage, Cumber’s mirror would have been distant and untouchable. The immateriality of early modern props and their evidence is tantalising, but apt. Performance is always an embodied, phenomenological event, but spectators may not always have full, unmediated access to performance materials. Distanced, intangible, unknowable: these experiences of the material resemble those of the researcher as much as the early modern audience.

Anouska Lester is the Before Shakespeare PhD Candidate with the English and Creative Writing Department at the University of Roehampton.

She would like to thank Andy Kesson and Clare McManus for their feedback while writing this post.

Selected Bibliography.

Bowsher, Julian, and Pat Miller. The Rose and the Globe: Playhouses of Shakespeare’s Bankside, Southwark: Excavations 1988-91 (Museum of London Archaeology, 2009).

Feuillerat, Albert, editor. Documents Relating to the Office of the Revels in the Time of Queen Elizabeth (Louvain, 1908).

French, Peter J. John Dee: The World of an Elizabethan Magus (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972).

Macfarlane, Alan. Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: A Regional and Comparative Study. 2nd ed. (Routledge, 1999).

Munday, Anthony. John a Kent & John a Cumber. Edited by M. St Clare [Muriel St Clare] Byrne (Printed for the Malone Society at the Oxford University Press, 1923).

Plat, Hugh. Delightes for Ladies, to Adorne Their Persons, Tables, Closets, and Distillatories. VVith, Bewties, Banquets, Perfumes and Waters. Read, Practise, and Censure. (London, 1600).

2 April 2021.